« Fantastic SBRA Resource from Judge Bonapfel | Main | 74 Law Professors Sign Letter in Support of the Consumer Bankruptcy Reform Act » posted by Mitu Gulati Cathy Hwang and Matt Jennejohn, two of the brightest young stars of the contract world, just put up a paper summarizing their view of one of the exciting new directions that contract research is taking. They describe it as the study of contractual complexity ("The New Research on Contractual Complexity", is their title). But I don't like the term "contractual complexity" at all, since I simply cannot take seriously the idea that anything that lawyers do is all that complex. Convoluted, confused and obscure, yes. But complex? Hell no. What I see their wonderful paper as being about is the new research on the production of contracts. As they point out, it all starts from the foundations laid in a set of important papers by the brilliant Barak Richman. Barak has long been puzzled as to why contract scholars have generally had little interest in how contracts are produced -- even though key assumptions about the production process form the backbone for theories and doctrines of contract interpretation (something that contract scholars, old and new, do care deeply about).